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Cloning boot disk 11.10 not working

I have an "embedded" computer with an 8 GB flash ATA disk, /dev/sda and a 256 GB flash SATA drive /dev/sdb (for data). The computer boots to the 8 GB disk which is a few GB too small (I have less than 200 MB free space). I've been trying to clone the 8 GB disk to the 256 GB disk and boot to it but it's not working. I used boot-repair which modified the /dev/sda grub.cfg file to include sdb1 options. The grub.cfg on /dev/sdb remains unchanged (with directions not to modify it!).

When I configure the BIOS/CMOS to boot from the 256 GB disk grub comes up with a lot of options and I choose the generic linux for sdb1 - not the recovery option (there are several options with older versions of linux).

It then boots to sda1 and when I shut down then boot and check the CMOS I find that it has been reset to the 8 GB disk!

Data from disk repair is available at Ubuntu at:

paste dot ubuntu dot com/1326854

I'm new to LINUX and really frustrated as I've been working on this for nearly a week now and my boss is a bit impatient. Later on we will purchase 16 GB flash cards to upgrade this computer and three others and I'll need to do the process in reverse.

If I understand you correctly, the system you're working with isn't one you can easily modify so you're trying to make the most of the hardware that's currently in it. If so, then I'd consider a different approach which avoids trying to force the config to be very different from what the manufacturer intended. You could leave the 8GB device as the boot drive, but just move the parts of the filesystem that need the extra space to the 256GB drive. For instance, if all the storage you need is in "/home" then you just copy that tree to the 256GB device and then symlink "/home" to point to the other drive. As long as the system doesn't fight you on configuring it to mount the 256GB drive then splitting the data across the devices is fine.